Archives for the month of: January, 2016
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U.S. Department of Education Still Pursuing Your Child’s Data

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
17

Valerie Strauss writes that the U.S. Department of Education plans a new student data base that will collect personally identifiable information on 12,000 students, 500 teachers, and 104 principals, and and make the data available to private contractors.

 

EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), the nation’s premier organization defending privacy, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education and said that its plans violate federal privacy laws.

 

The project is small today, only 12,000 students. But the precedent would allow larger and larger invasions of student privacy in the future.

 

The U.S. Department of Education worked closely with the Gates Foundation to try to establish inBloom, a data-collecting project that was halted by parent opposition. That data would have been available to private vendors too.

 

There is a federal law protecting student privacy. Clearly, the law should be strengthened so that the Department of Education is clearly barred from gathering personally identifiable information about any student. Under this administration, the ED has been a willing handmaiden of commercial interests, not children. This must stop.

Categories Education Reform, Privacy, U.S. Department of Education

Detroit: Teachers Fight Back

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
11

Just in from Detroit. Teachers will protest the ongoing efforts to destroy public education in Detroit.

”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE Contact: (313) 355-3205

DPS TEACHERS FIGHT BACK!

“A Union Within a Union”

“Teachers from more than 40 DPS schools are demanding safe conditions, adequate learning environments, and a level playing field for DPS Students.”

Detroit- DPS Teachers Fight Back (A union Within a Union), is a group of teachers mobilizing to unite, shed light on unsafe and subpar learning conditions, and demand resolution. Just as doctors take the Hippocratic Oath to uphold ethical standards, teachers also take a Loyalty Oath to serve, protect and allow no harm. Unfortunately, we have been unable to live up to that with the constant change of leadership, state control and 4 consecutive Emergency Managers.

On Monday, January 11, 2016, 12 p.m., DPS Teachers will join in solidarity during a rally organized by teachers from Paul Robeson at Malcolm X Academy at the Fisher Building, 3011 W Grand Blvd, Detroit, MI 48202. Despite the increased cost of medical care, and lost wages, teachers are choosing to go without pay or to take a personal day stand in unity.

We are not affiliated with BAMN, its leadership, or any former DFT leadership. We are teachers united as it is time that we stand up and defend our students, our profession, and our rights! Our cornerstone issues are Academics, Fairness & Equity. Our goal is to ensure that Detroit students are no longer pay for the deficit created by state control, and to protect their civil rights and ability to receive an exemplary education.

In an Open Letter to DPS Parents, DPS Teacher Sarah Jardine shared the following:

“Dear Parent, I write this to you on this night because you’re on my mind. You live in Detroit and you send your child to Detroit Public Schools. You trust me everyday with your children. I feel that I owe you an apology. I apologize because I should have stood up. I kept quiet as they dismantled our schools. I was silent when they took your schools from you. I didn’t protest in the streets when they put our schools in State control. I said nothing when they took your democracy. I should be ashamed of myself. I, the teacher you trusted, had power to start a revolution, and fight for you, and I didn’t fight back. Tonight, I am going to make you a promise that I won’t sit quiet any longer.” (Read Here)

Public education is the cornerstone to democracy, and Detroit teachers deserve to be treated the same way teachers are treated in Livonia, Novi, West Bloomfield, Grosse Pointe, Troy, and all other districts throughout the state of Michigan.

In an Open Letter to Darnell Earley, 4th Grade DPS Teacher, Pam Namyslowski said:

“Mr. Earley, I have been a teacher in Detroit Public Schools for 24 years. I feel the need to respond to some of the comments you made during your press conference this week. You described the actions of protesting teachers as “unethical”. I’m curious, then, how you would characterize the learning conditions of the children of Detroit Public Schools that have existed for years. These deplorable learning conditions happen to also be the teachers’ working conditions.” (Read here)

The DPS Teachers Fight Back Rally will include remarks from Dr. James Perkins, Greater Christ Baptist Church, DPS Parents, and DPS Teacher organizers, during which a list of concerns and demands will be shared including: Safe learning conditions for all students, Increasing student academic achievement, and the removal of Emergency Manager Darnell Earley, who was an integral part of the Flint Water Crisis. We hereby stand united to protect the 47 thousand students remaining within Detroit Public Schools and demand immediate corrective action!

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click here for DPS Fight Back Press Release PDF

Categories Detroit, Resistance

Should High Schools Be Academic Pressure Cookers?

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
78

The parents in a suburban school district in New Jersey have split into warring factions in response to the superintendent’s effort to reduce academic pressures.

Mostly white parents applauded his decision to reduce academic stress, but many Asian parents were outraged. The latter feared their children would not be prepared for highly competitive colleges.

“This fall, David Aderhold, the superintendent of a high-achieving school district near Princeton, N.J., sent parents an alarming 16-page letter.

“The school district, he said, was facing a crisis. Its students were overburdened and stressed out, juggling too much work and too many demands.

“In the previous school year, 120 middle and high school students were recommended for mental health assessments; 40 were hospitalized. And on a survey administered by the district, students wrote things like, “I hate going to school,” and “Coming out of 12 years in this district, I have learned one thing: that a grade, a percentage or even a point is to be valued over anything else.”

“With his letter, Dr. Aderhold inserted West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District into a national discussion about the intense focus on achievement at elite schools, and whether it has gone too far.

“At follow-up meetings, he urged parents to join him in advocating a holistic, “whole child” approach to schooling that respects “social-emotional development” and “deep and meaningful learning” over academics alone. The alternative, he suggested, was to face the prospect of becoming another Palo Alto, Calif., where outsize stress on teenage students is believed to have contributed to two clusters of suicides in the last six years.

“But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold’s letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter’s middle school, who has come to see the district’s increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.

“My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,’ ” Ms. Foley said.

“On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.”

Categories High School Graduation

John Thompson on Education and the Media

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
11

John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about a growing awareness in the mainstream media of the infusion of Big Money into education. The New York Review of Books is a major influence among highly educated people and has a reach far beyond professional educators.

 

 

The New York Review of Book’s Michael Massing, in “Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent,” proposes a new journalism to document and explain the effects of secretive corporate elites on our diverse social institutions. He basically calls for a very well-funded version of the Diane Ravitch blog.

 
O.K., it’s more complicated than that. Massing notes that “Education is but one area of American life that is being transformed by Big Money.” He wants a website that is staffed by top investigative journalists, and experts in the fields that are being taken over by “billionaires [who] are shaping policy, influencing opinion, promoting favorite causes, polishing their images—and carefully shielding themselves from scrutiny.”

 
Massing proposes a site, complete with reporters, editors, and “digital whizzes,” who “could burrow deep into the world of the one percent and document the remarkable impact they are having on so many areas of American life.” Similar to Ravitch’s blog, its purpose would be “tracking the major participants, showing the links between them, assessing their influence and impact, and analyzing the evidence on the performance of both public and charter schools.”

 
Moreover, Massing wants a site that:

 
Could also serve as a sounding board for people in the field, encouraging principals, teachers, parents, and grantees to send in comments about their dealings with these institutions. The most thoughtful could be edited and posted on the site, providing a bottom-up perspective that rarely gets aired.

 
Massing explains that “even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality … the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view.” And, “journalists have largely let them get away with it.” We need sites that will cover more than education, but Massing, who has been influenced by the work of Mohammad Khan, Zephyr Teachout, and Ravitch, uses their work as a model for the 21st century journalism we need.

 

His website would:

 
Produce an ongoing record of the activities of the foundations and private donors trying to affect education policy. The political and lobbying efforts of the teachers’ unions and their allies would be included as well, showing how much money and influence they are able to mobilize in elections and for what candidates.

 

In the first of two articles, Massing describes Paul Singer, the CEO of the hedge fund Elliott Management as an example of “the ability of today’s ultrarich to amass tremendous power while remaining out of the limelight.” Singer is not merely a key funder of the blood-in-the-eye, anti-union StudentsFirst NY, but also the test, sort, reward and punish policies pushed by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and other corporate school reformers. The billionaire is the single largest donor to the Republican Party; a backer of Marco Rubio and many Tea Party candidates; a funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s war record; a donor to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the anti-tax group, Club for Growth; and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “which has worked tirelessly to isolate and sanction Iran.”
To illustrate the secretive and far-reaching influence of the One Percent, Massing draws upon the Washington Park Project, and Kahn’s and Teachout’s “Corruption in Education: Hedge Funds and the Takeover of New York’s Schools.” 

 

They offered:

 
An eye-opening look at the large sums being spent by what it called “a tiny group of powerful hedge fund executives” seeking to “take over education policy” in the state. This “lightning war on public education,” they wrote, was “hasty and secretive” and “driven by unaccountable private individuals. It represents a new form of political power, and therefore requires a new kind of political oversight.”

 
Massing then praises the online Hechinger Report and Diane Ravitch who have sharply analyzed the record of the Billionaires Boy’s Club and education reform movement. He explains the need to further document the activities of the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations, as well as analyze their real world effects on schools.

 
Yes, America needs websites for examining the structure of money and influence on all of our institutions. Ravitch and her contributors, commenters, and readers should all feel proud of our bottom-up efforts. Massing is correct; our nation needs to produce Diane Ravitchs to lead similar grassroots efforts in health, finance, economics, and politics. I bet it will happen.

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Media

Gary Sasso: Why Don’t the Billionaires Support Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
42

In an article in Salon, Gary Sasso asks why the billionaires are so intent on funding privately-managed alternatives to public schools. Sasso is the Dean of the College of Education at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. After all, if they want to improve education, the vast majority of students in this nation attend public schools. Why aren’t they helping public schools? The reality is that charter schools drain funding from public schools, and they usually don’t get better results (if one considers only test scores). Many of them have a stern disciplinary regime that may raise test scores but does not improve education or the spirit of learning.

 

Sasso says that the huge disparities in income today and the erosion of the middle class explain more about educational outcomes than anything that happens in schools. Why are the 1% focused solely on the schools?

 

Sasso speculates:

 

Charter schools will never be the answer to improving education for all. It is simply not scaleable. And yet titans of industry such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family, and billionaires such as John Paulson who earlier this year gave $8.5 million to New York’s Success Academy charter school system, are pouring their millions into support for charter schools—millions that will not, incidentally, be invested in improving the schools that the vast majority of U.S. students attend: traditional public schools.

 

Can it be a coincidence that those who have benefited most from the last 50 years of steadily increasing income inequality—the top 10 percent–support an education solution that hinges on denigrating public school teachers, dismantling unions and denying that income inequality is the underlying condition at the root of the problem?

 

The most generous explanation for this phenomenon says that the wealthiest among us are motivated to support charter schools purely out of ideology. They are operating under deeply held beliefs that a school system run by the government smothers innovation and that teachers unions inhibit a free market system that, if allowed to operate, would result in better teachers and child outcomes. In addition, these philanthropists believe that public education has become so hidebound that meaningful change within the system is no longer possible, and that fresh ideas and programs not beholden to a system that resists change will provide programs and ideas that are more effective.

 

Another explanation that has been posited is that good, old-fashioned greed is at the root. After all, the wealthy did not achieve their wealth through an indifference to achieving a return on their investments—and our public school system is a $621 billion per year endeavor. For example, a recent investigation by the Arizona Republic found that the state’s charter schools purchased a variety of goods and services from the companies of its own board members or administrators. In fact, the paper found at least 17 such contracts or arrangements totaling more than $70 million over five years.

 

In addition, there are specific tax loopholes that make it especially attractive to donate to charter schools. Banks and equity and hedge funds that invest in charter schools in underserved areas can take advantage of a tax credit. They are permitted to combine this tax credit with other tax breaks while they also collect interest on any money they lend out. According to analysts, the credit allows them to double the money they invested in seven years.

 

However, applying the principle of Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is usually the best), the super-rich may support charter schools to weaken unions. That strategy increases inequality of wealth and income, especially for the poorest kids whom the charter promoters claim to be “saving.”

 

Sasso suggests that the best path forward for the 1% would be to focus on rebuilding the middle class, which is currently being squashed.

 

Rebuilding the middle class—not expanding charter schools—is the most effective path to increasing access to quality education and to giving more students the opportunity to achieve their dreams.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Jobs, Privatization

Addendum to Detroit Public Schools’ Dilemma

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
18

The same emergency manager who cut off the safe water supply in Flint, Michigan, to save money and caused lead poisoning in many children is now the emergency manager of the Detroit Public Schools. Heckuva job, Governor Snyder.

Categories Education Reform, Michigan

Detroit Teachers Plan “Sick Out” to Protest Abominable Conditions

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
16

According to The Guardian, Detroit teachers plan a sick-out onMonday.

 

Detroit public schools are in horrible shape. When the state took over, the district had a surplus but now it has a huge deficit.

 

“Detroit’s public schools have been a problem for Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, a Republican who ushered the city into the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. Most observers agree the success of Detroit is contingent upon whether its schools can be fixed.

 

“Snyder has made a $715m proposal to overhaul the failing district in 2016. It has so far received little support in the Michigan legislature.

 

“Asked about the spate of sickouts, David Murray, a spokesman for Snyder, said: “Detroit children need to be in school. In addition to their education, it’s where many children get their best meals and better access to the social services they need. There are certainly problems that [need] to be addressed, quickly.”

 

“Snyder’s plan would eliminate debt in the district that is equal to $1,100 per child, Murray said. That was “money that could be better spent in the classroom, lowering class sizes, raising pay and improving benefits”.

 

“Tom Pedroni, an associate professor at Wayne State University, said the governor’s plan was commendable for “taking seriously the notion that Detroit public schools needs debt relief”.

 

“We know that with the current debt figures if the issue is not addressed soon, Detroit public schools students will be losing [nearly half of the state’s per-pupil funding total],” Pedroni said, adding: “It’s unconscionable that students lose that to debt service.”

 

“The problem with Snyder’s plan, Pedroni said, was that it relied on governing the school district with a board of appointees, not elected members. Since 2009, under a state-appointed emergency manager, the elected board has been effectively neutered.

 

“There’s currently a lot of debate over whether those appointees for the new Detroit school board [in Snyder’s proposal] would be mayoral appointees or gubernatorial appointees,” Pedroni said.

 

“But to me, really all of those are inexcusable because what I think we see happening in the district in Detroit is really an indictment of the sort of heavy-handed power from the executive branch without any checks or balances.”

 

“Pedroni said this was similar to what has taken place in the nearby city of Flint. There, a state-appointed emergency manager has been alleged to have decided to use a local river as the city’s main water source. The move has been linked to an increased level of lead in household water supply.

 

“When in 1999 the state first stepped in and overhauled the governance of Detroit schools, the district’s budget carried a $93m-surplus. According to an analysis by the Citizens Research Council, a Michigan-based policy research group, in the most recent fiscal year the district reported a budget deficit of nearly $216m.

 

“An estimated 41 cents out of every state dollar appropriated for students is spent on debt service, according to the council’s report.

 

“Despite being under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager since 2009, Detroit public schools, the state’s largest district, is failing academically and financially,” the report said.

“Despite a depleted school enrollment, class sizes have increased and teachers have repeatedly taken pay cuts. Only one-third of high school students are proficient in reading, according to Snyder’s office.

 

“Teachers say students are being judged unfairly. In an open letter to the Detroit public schools emergency manager, Darnell Earley, who blasted teachers for the sickout protests last week, fourth-grade teacher Pam Namyslowski said pupils had been “set up to fail in every way”.

 

“We ARE [the students’] voice,” Namyslowski wrote. “We are on the front line, working side by side with them every day, trying our best to overcome numerous obstacles.

 

“In the winter, we often work in freezing rooms with our coats on with them. In the summertime, we survive with them in stifling heat and humidity in temperatures that no one should have to work in. We wipe their tears and listen when they are upset.”

 

“Successes in the classroom typically go unnoticed, Namyslowski continued, as “most cannot be measured or displayed on a data wall”.

Categories Budget Cuts, Detroit, Education Reform, Funding, Teachers

North Carolina: The Height of Chutzpah, as Charter Leader Knocks Use of Scholars’ Study

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
14

The leader of the North Carolina Charter Association, one Lee Teague, referred to the report on charters by the state’s Department of Public Instruction as “garbage,” because it cited the study of three nationally renowned Duke University scholars. The Lt. Governor Dan Forest is trying to withhold the report because it is too “negative.” He was hoping for something positive. The report found that charters are more segregated than public schools and less diverse.

 

For those who might be unfamiliar with the term “chutzpah,” it is a Yiddish word that means arrogance, or a combination of arrogance and ignorance.

 

P.S.: By using the term “scholars,” I am not referring to students in charter schools. I am referring to academicians who have a Ph.D. in their field of study.

Categories Charter Schools, North Carolina

Parents to New York Education Leaders: No Snooping on Our Children’s Private Data

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
10

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and Lisa Rudley of the New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) wrote to New York State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia and the Board of Regents to protest the latest Gates grant for collection and implementation of student data. They are concerned that the purpose of the grant is to re-start efforts to exploit personally identifiable student data, one of Gates’ passions. In addition, the grant went to a privately funded group (funded largely by Gates) called the Regents Research Fund, which operates as a “shadow government,” with neither transparency nor accountability.

 

By law, the state is required to have a Chief Privacy Officer, but no qualified person has been appointed. The acting CPO has no background in the field and has resisted complying with parent requests for information about their own children.

 

The quest for student data is endless:

 

Our concerns about expanded student data collection are also exacerbated by the fact that we have been unable to get any information about why NYSED officials decided that the personal student data collected by the state should be eventually placed into the State Archives, eight years after a student’s graduation from high school, with no date certain when it will be destroyed. We have asked what restrictions will be placed on access to that data, when if ever the data will be deleted, and have requested a copy of the memo in which state officials apparently determined that these records have “long-term historical value and should be transferred to the State Archives.”vi Neither NYSED nor the State Archives will answer our questions or provide us a copy of this memo, and instead demanded that we FOIL for it.

 

They point out that the same issue raised parent ire against former Commissioner John King (now the Acting Secretary of Education):

 

The previous Commissioner faced intense opposition from parents, school board members, district superintendents, teachers and elected officials over his plan to share personal student data with the Gates-funded data store called inBloom Inc. Because of strong public opposition and NYSED’s refusal to change course, the Legislature was forced to pass a new law to block the participation of the state in the inBloom project. The controversy over inBloom was one of the major issues that contributed to the public’s loss of trust in Commissioner King’s leadership, as well as his eventual resignation. We do not want to have to engage in such an intense battle over student privacy once again in relation to this new data collection plan.

 

Parents should send their own letters to the State Commissioner, the Board of Regents, and legislators. Now is the time to protect your child’s privacy rights!

Categories Data, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, New York, Privacy

Here is the Report On N.C. Charters That State Leaders Don’t Want You to Read

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
14

This report on charter schools in North Carolina was written in 2015 by three members of the Duke faculty. It was cited in a summary written for the Legislature by the Department of Public Instruction. The DPI summary is being withheld by the Lt. Governor Dan Forest because it is too “negative.”

 

The original report on charters was written by Professors Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University. It will be published in the Journal of Education Policy and Finance.

 

What it shows, among other things, is that charter schools are less diverse than public schools as a sector and are more segregated than public schools. Charter schools are facilitating the resegregation of the schools in North Carolina.

 

 

You can download the report here.

 

Sorry, Governor McCrory and Lt. Governor Forest: You may bully the DPI, but you can’t suppress the work of distinguished academics. They don’t work for you. They have tenure.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization
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